In recent vehicle technology, a system making it possible to check the left and right sides and the front and rear of a vehicle through a display disposed in a dashboard of the vehicle using images captured by small-sized cameras installed at the front and rear parts of the vehicle as well as the left and right parts of the vehicle for safe driving has been used, or small-sized cameras have been utilized at various places for various purposes in order to check images of the surroundings in real time. In the full-scale utilization of cameras, the quality of images captured by the cameras is very important in evaluating the performance of the cameras. Cameras that have been used in recent years have circuit-related problems, such as data compression, power consumption, and limited internal memory, and camera module-related problems, such as difficulty in optical zooming, the use of low-pass optical filters, low-quality reproduction of colors, and limited resolution. As a result, the quality of images captured by such cameras is lower than the quality of images captured by dedicated digital cameras.
The overall quality of an image is determined based on an image chain comprising an input module, an image processing module, and an output module. In particular, the quality of the image is greatly affected by the characteristics of the input module, such as a camera.
A conventional camera module includes a printed circuit board, an image sensor mounted on the printed circuit board, a housing for receiving the image sensor mounted on the printed circuit board, and a lens barrel coupled to the housing so as to be located above the image sensor. The image sensor and a lens mounted in the lens barrel are aligned with each other based on the optical axis of the lens. Subsequently, the housing and the lens barrel are assembled and fixed to each other using an adhesive. In addition, the housing and the printed circuit board are assembled and fixed to each other using an adhesive. A plurality of printed circuit boards, including a printed circuit board for supplying power to the printed circuit board having the image sensor mounted thereon, may be further disposed on the printed circuit board having the image sensor mounted thereon.
In the case in which the plurality of printed circuit boards is connected to the printed circuit board having the image sensor mounted thereon, however, the printed circuit board having the image sensor mounted thereon may be physically stressed by the plurality of printed circuit boards disposed on the printed circuit board having the image sensor mounted thereon.